Colby Cosh: How socialist Cuba charted its demographic doom

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The working-age adults of Cubankind are leaving for the United States

Published Sep 19, 2024 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 3 minute read

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Drivers queue to get fuel near a gas station in Havana on April 24, 2023. Photo by YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty ImagesArticle content

Canadian headlines are full, in the year 2024, of news items about uncontrolled mass immigration and its many political consequences. So it might be worth remembering that a small country, assuming it is managed much worse than Canada is, might encounter the opposite problem: simultaneous mass abandonment by its ancestral population at working age.

This is now happening in Cuba, and the Cuban government, after three years of half-acknowledged “migration crisis,” has finally begun to learn and confess to the full dimensions of the problem. In July the country’s chief statistician admitted to a fact that even exterior and dissident demographers hadn’t quite fathomed: 10 per cent of the remaining Cuban population, about a million people out of 10, left Cuba in calendar 2023.

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Cuba has been in an unholy economic mess since COVID-19 temporarily wiped out international tourism, which is by far its most important industry. But during the many analogous crises in Cuba’s glorious socialist history, the state was able to count on its island setting to discourage the self-evacuation of discouraged, miserable Cubans. Friendly socialist allies with deep pockets no longer exist, and neither COVID nor the United States trade embargo can be reasonably blamed for the total collapse of Cuban agricultural production, something the government also admitted to in the summer. (We suppose there’s still the CIA, for all you diehard tankies who need a universal pantomime villain.)

Thanks to changes in Nicaraguan visa policies, and to the Biden administration’s friendlier treatment of border-crossing Cuban exiles, Cubans who want to live anywhere but Cuba now have a less risky means of escape than turning oil drums into rafts: they can reach the promised land of the U.S. through the corridor of Central America. Some sign up for tourist flights and simply never go back, and the U.S., by and large, won’t force them. Cuban electoral rolls (voting is mandatory there) have hinted at the scale of the national implosion, and the scheduled 2022 Cuban census was delayed until 2025 (place your bets on whether there will ever be another one).

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The 2020s Cuban exodus is disproportionately female, unlike previous mass escapes from the island, and demographers are seeing a heartbreaking “reverse Peter Pan” pattern where working-age parents leave their children behind with grandparents. In the wake of the original Cuban Revolution, wealthy parents would send their children to the U.S. in the hope of following; now the parents, none of whom are at all wealthy, abscond and hope their children can one day follow.

At the outset of the crisis, Cuba’s socialist government loosened prior restrictions on small businesses, which is to say “It explicitly allowed those to exist for the first time since the Revolution.” Any student of socialism could foresee what would happen next. Private markets would, when allowed, supply otherwise unavailable essential goods at high prices; a few geniuses would get visibly rich from this; pensioners and state employees would grow envious and angry; and the government would get nervous, crack down and reassert the holy principles.

Wednesday, as Reuters reports, officially demarcates the legal expiry of Cuba’s brief New Economic Policy period, with new laws coming into effect that “end incentives for the creation of new businesses, restrict independent wholesalers and add new requirements for applicants seeking to start a company. They also boost taxes, bolster worker’s rights, tighten accounting requirements and sharpen oversight of the private sector.”

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This sounds like a bunch of stuff you wouldn’t blink at if Justin Trudeau announced it tomorrow, but the real upshot is that the Cuban government is going to cook and eat the appetizing private enterprise golden goose. Where the (literal!) next meal comes from, nobody knows.

In the meantime, Cuba itself is disappearing before our eyes, with the entire Cuban variety of mankind transplanting itself gradually to soil whereupon the human spirit can thrive. Me, I believe Cubankind should be able to enjoy the benefit of the physical land of Cuba, whose sybaritic glories are so familiar to morally incurious Canadian tourists. For all socialism’s amazing achievements in human immiseration, this fast-forward destruction of a nation may be something really new.

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